Sunday, May 14, 2017

May 14, 1907 – At 2:40 p.m. Chicago White Sox officials begin the festivities that
honor the team for the victory in six games of the “Hitless Wonder” in the 1906
World Series against cross-town rivals, the Chicago Cubs. “For ten minutes,” the Chicago Daily Tribune reports, “a stream of autos charged
intermittently through the gate and deposited city and baseball officials, ball
players, and rooters all over the outfield.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, May 15, 1907] Mayor Fred Busse, Police
Commissioner George Shippy, and Charles Comiskey unfurl the World Series
pennant and carry it to home plate where William Hale Thompson asks for and
receives “three cheers for Comiskey, three more for the White Sox, and still
another three for the mayor.” As the
ovation continues, a “mounted delegation” from the stockyards gallops “into the
field and rode pell mell around it to the accompaniment of vigorous
applause.” Then, the president of the
National Baseball Commission, August Hermann, presents the award to the mayor
and Comiskey. Silence fills the stadium
as “the ropes were being fastened by expert hands to the pennant. The white stockinged players, who had fought
for and won that emblem of supremacy, grasped the hoisting rope, forming themselves
into a long line with Manager Jones in the place of honor, and began to haul
away.” And then … “Just as 15,000
throats were swelling with the first notes of the grand paean which was to have
marked the climax of Chicago’s biggest baseball féte, just as the silken
banner, emblematic of the highest honors of the diamond, had shaken out its
folds over the White Sox park and started its upward climb in response to the
tugs of the heroes of the day, Comiskey’s veteran flagstaff swayed, trembled in
every fiber, then broke squarely off in the middle and toppled back to the
earth which reared it.” The pennant is
temporarily draped over a liquor sign in right center field as the game begins
in threatening weather and is quickly called as the field is “flooded beyond
all possibility of further play” within five minutes. Several cars have to be pulled out of the mud
in the outfield with the last one pulled off the field just before dark by a
team of horses. “The pennant will be
raised another day,” the paper concludes, “when President Comiskey is able to
have erected a new pole strong enough to bear the strain. But there will be no heroics. Chicago had those yesterday.” The presentation of the pennant at home plate is shown above.

May 14, 1920 – The Michigan Avenue bridge is opened to traffic. It took 24 years and four city mayors to get the project completed, a project that began, according to Mayor William Hale Thompson, with a suggestion from the wife of the city controller in 1891, Mrs. Horatio N. May, who thought it might be just swell to have a link across the river at Michigan Avenue. Twenty years later the first plans for the bridge were drawn up, and in 1913 the first ordinance pertaining to the construction of the bridge was passed. Condemnation proceedings, authorization of bonds to finance the project, and the federal government’s objection to the use of steel for the bridge during wartime kept construction from beginning until April 15, 1918. Finally, at 4 p.m. on this day Mayor Thompson leads a motorcade from Congress Plaza up Michigan Avenue to the new bridge, where he cuts the ceremonial ribbon. Airplanes appear above and drop confetti. Four thousand cars follow the mayor’s automobile across the new bridge. A tiny dirt road on the north side of the river called Pine Street is now poised to become one of the city’s most impressive thoroughfares.